Friday, February 22, 2008

an intimate conversation, a closeness despite the differences between you, an old soul in a new friend ~

then a long drive home, the lights on the bridge getting brighter, closer ~ as you ponder the profound impact of a gentle voice ~

is a lovely way to spend a Thursday evening.

I spent time tonight with my friend 'Y'. We are new friends, but she is so open, so honest, so raw at times it amazes me how she contains it all, or how a song hasn't been written about her yet. She brims with emotion, with wisdom and warmth ~ like the cup of tea you need at the end of a long day. She listens with her heart and her eyes ~ she speaks from the soul, from her core. And you can't help but listen ~ really listen.

Y told me about some difficult times she has had ~ about that low point that many (only a few?) of us reach when we have been dragged down by doubt ~ in ourselves and in others. For some, that point means forgetting all the great things about yourself. So many of us have done things to try to feel better about ourselves and/or numb the pain ~ some sleep around, some drink, some run away, many of us bury ourselves in work so we're not distracted by the emotions we don't know what to do with ~ some of us write about it so we don't have to live it. We all do something about it, for better or worse. Y did something about it, too.

One day she sent an email to some friends and family and, I say through sheer courage, she says through sheer need to survive, she asked them all simply, "Tell me something good about myself; I need to hear it."

She was inundated with responses.

I told Y how a few weeks ago our friend 'N' told me, "Think of something you really really want. ~ Now, I have no idea what it is unless you tell me." So many of us never really tell others what we really really want ~ not as in world peace or universal health care, but that other thing, that one "thing" you need to make it all better ~ have you told anyone about that?

Well, Y did ~ she admitted to a whole group of people what she needed. And when she read all the responses, all the wonderful things about her, she thought, "Well then, they can't all be wrong!" And she smiled at me.

For some of my friends, if I tried that, they would likely punch me in the arm. I have one friend who, when I make her laugh (which is often, usually at my expense), she will put her arm around me, kiss my cheek and giggle, "damn I love you." So, I'll take what I can get.

You think you know what I'm going to ask you, don't you?

Well, I do want you to do something ~ I want you to think of that vital person you haven't seen in a year or in a week, or the person you woke up next to this morning, or the person you wished you had woken up next to ~ that person you should call or email or tweet or DM or text or scream at across the house ~ and I want you to tell them what you like about them ~

tell them something good ~ about themselves. don't wait until they need to hear it.

Go ahead ~ I'll wait ~ then come back here and tell me what it was like.

And for no particular reason, or maybe at least one good one, this song [mp3] to close the evening ~ or start the day, since it's 1 am. ~ ;-)

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Thursday night over dinner, a friend asked, "What was your childhood like?" Just like that, out of the blue, over a pink lemonade with a bright green sprig of mint floating on top, and red lanterns reflecting in the window watching over us.

I've been asked this question before; we all have. Without thinking, I almost uttered my usual answer: "I don't remember." But I stopped for a bit, I thought about it again, I squeezed my eyes and tried to shake out at least one memory ~ like the final flavorful granules out of an empty salt shaker ~ but none came. And so my answer was the same: "I don't remember."

But I wasn't talking about childhood amnesia (the common inability of adults to remember the earliest years of their childhood, typically anything before age 3 or 4). No, my marker is age 14 ~ I told my friend I cannot remember anything, well no structured memory, before I was age 14. I explained that our family home burned down when I was 14, on Christmas Eve; a brand new house, with brand new everything, a Christmas tree overflowing with presents, and everything inside but the clothes on our backs. The fire was so traumatic that my memories seem to begin with that event; everything before seems to have been erased. I wrote about the fire before, briefly ~ about fleeting Fire Memories. But Thursday night I told my friend more details about the fire ~ important moments of that particular day that I have not told anyone, no one. In so doing, it made me remember one more important detail about what happened that day ~ something I had never thought about before; it's important, and so now I need to fit that piece into the puzzle that the fire has been for me for so many years. So, while I was lightly liberated, in revealing something to someone that I have never uttered before to another living soul, I was also more deeply distracted by what the revelation means. I suspect it will take another decade to figure it out. As I sat there and thought about all this, and as my friend stared at me with wide disbelieving eyes, I realized the song playing on the restaurant's speakers was one of my favorites: El Cuarto de Tula [mp3] by Cuarteto Patria. Really. The song is about the firemen, with their bells and their sirens, rushing to Tula's room, which is on fire. The utter irony danced around me as Eliades Ochoa taunted me with his melody ~~ Ay mamá, ¿qué pasó....

I don't know if changing the pieces of the puzzle, or filling it out more completely, will help me remember more about my childhood ~ but for now, I remember only 4 specific things:

(1) The smell of the cafeteria in my elementary school. At certain moments in my adult life, I have recognized the smell, which I can't describe, and I remembered my elementary school ~ I don't remember my friends, or what the school looks like, or even if my siblings were born yet ~ only the smell. It is comforting, despite the darkness of the canvas surrounding it.

(2) I have a tiny heart-shaped scar on top of my left foot; right on the bony part. When my family lived on the North Side of Houston, in a tiny apartment in the 'hood, I walked to the corner store with someone, but I can't remember whom. We bought a huge bottle of Coca Cola ~ they were still made of glass back then. I carried the bottle home, and just before we made it to the front yard, the bottle slipped and broke across my left foot. I can't even remember how old I was. I only remember the glint of the sun in the shards of Coca-Cola glass, and standing barefoot and bloody in the steamy summer heat that wafted up from the warm sidewalk. I don't remember any other part of that day.

(3) I have a small scar, like a small brush stroke, right at the corner of my right eye. If I were a chola, the scar is where I would have them ink the tear-drop tattoo. One summer in Matamoros (I don't remember how old I was), a family friend or cousin and I were playing in the street. Either we started playing rough, or he got mad at me, but from several feet away he flung a twig or a stick at me ~ hard. I remember watching the twig propel itself towards me and at the last possible millisecond, I twitched my head to left and closed my eyes ~ the twig punctured a small spot of skin, right at the bony edge of my eye socket. My grandparents, realizing how bad it could have been, made it that much worse for the boy who threw the stick at me. I can't remember at all who the boy was or is.

(4) There is a small imprint of a steel beam, in the shape of a tiny leaf, on the bridge of my nose ~ right between my eyes. I don't remember how old I was, but well before I was 14 I can assure you, somehow my family convinced me to be a cheerleader (along with my sister) for my little brother's flag football team. I don't remember any of the game that day, or ever cheering at any of the games, or any of the other little girls on the cheerleading team. The uniforms were maroon I think, with white turtlenecks maybe. But at that one game, or maybe it was the first and only game for me, I remember that it was time for us to line up on either side of the goal post, to hold the banner between the posts so that the football players could burst through it, onto the field. Just as I was about to take my place on the field, I think my mom dropped her car keys under the bleachers ~ she was sitting up pretty high and far back. She insisted I go grab her keys ~ I was furious. So, in my Arrona-stubborn-step, I stomped under the bleachers, found her keys in the grass, bent down hurriedly to pick them up, and whirled around ~ smack dab nose-first into a steel beam. Maybe I never went back and cheered at any games, who knows. It was my fault, for rushing under there and stomping around ~ I remember that ~ and I remember vividly the lightening between my eyes when the edge of the steel beam ripped into the bridge of my nose. And the kids at school making fun of me when I went to class with a bandage or band-aid across my nose.

I think that's it. And these memories I remember because I have a physical reminder of each one ~ a sense of each of these moments has been ingrained in me ~ on me. If I didn't have any physical scars, would I remember less? Or more? This has been a lifelong struggle, well at least since I was 14 ~~ to remember what it was like, what *I* was like, at age 7 or 8 or 9 or 10. When I see my friends' children, and I see how fully their personalities are formed at those ages, and even younger, I wonder to myself what I may have been like ~ did I make profound philosophical statements like Jaq does? Or did I emote as much as Dylan does, or use puns like she does? Did I ask questions like Shelby does? Did I read the dictionary like Diandra did when she was 7 or 8? Did I shrug my shoulders and sigh like Rudy Jr. does?

For most people, looking at childhood photographs may jog their memory ~ a photo of you in the bathtub when you were 6 may help you remember that you wrestled with your brother in the mud that day. A photo of you smiling broadly may help you remember it was the day your braces came off. But for me, for my family, most of our photographs burned in the fire. We've never even talked about the fire. Ever.

There is a concept called the Forgetting Curve ~ it illustrates the decline of memory retention in time (the "speed of forgetting"). But related to the Forgetting Curve is the concept of strength of memory that refers to the durability that memory traces in the brain ~ that is, the stronger the memory, the longer we can remember it.

That's why photos, actual printed photos not just pixels on my Flickr account, mean so much to me. And what photos represent, well it means that much more ~ a firestorm of memory more. ~ One August, a lifetime ago, I stayed up all night making a scrapbook, a memory book, for someone ~ an attempt to capture all of the good memories in one place, to make them all tangible so that they could be made worth their weight in gold. But, the person didn't even really look through the scrapbook until days later, and the scrapbook stayed behind while the person moved on around the world; and the scrapbook was tossed into a box with other knick knacks and books, and put into storage, shortly thereafter; it's sitting alone in the dark, as memories are apt to do, I suppose.

But I want to remember. I want it to have meant something ~ what the photo represents means something ~ you can't appreciate that until you lose your photos, or your memories, or the value someone else never really placed on them anyway. That's why photos, and memories, are so important to me.

A few years ago, my mom mailed me what photos she did have of me as a kid ~ the handful of tiny snapshots, some still singed around the edges from the smoke damage, fit into a single ziploc sandwich bag. Looking at most of the photos though, didn't jog my memory about the events they pictured. There was a photo of me in a bikini (gasp) at maybe age 8 or 9, doing a headstand in the wet sand. I have no recollection of ever going to the beach with my family, and I couldn't have been in my right mind, what with doing a headstand in a bikini.

But there was one photo, from a Halloween party at my dad's bodega, where I vaguely remember my mom buying costumes for my brothers at the last minute from a drug store ~ I think my brothers were horrified by the plastic ready-to-wear Chewbacca and Maitre'D costumes my mom made them wear. I think my mom told my sister she could go to the Halloween party as a little girl ~ but she WAS a little girl! They put her hair in crooked pony tails and made her wear white tights. We were so poor back then. So, for me, they made me a Gypsy ~ I call it foreshadowing. I think I'm wearing one of my mom's scarves around my head and some of her clothes.

I read somewhere that D. Ewen Cameron wrote in 1963: "Intelligence may be the pride — the towering distinction of man; emotion gives colour and force to his actions; but memory is the bastion of his being. Without memory, there is no personal identity, there is no continuity to the days of his life. Memory provides the raw material for designs both small and great. Thus, governed and enriched by memory, all the enterprises of man go forward."

So, if I have no memory, do I have no identity? If I make it up as I go along, is my identity true to my real self? Does your childhood shape you so much that even if you can't remember it, you are trapped by it? If everything you once knew goes up in flames, what fragments do you sift out of the ashes? Which do you leave behind?